Conclusion: You know, this is a lager but feels closer to an IPA than Brewdog’s Indie pale Ale did. Which isn’t saying much.

Ok, cheap shot out of the way, the heavy use of hop fruitiness that makes me think of an IPA with this beer also ends up giving this a very different mouthfeel to your average lager. It brings a fluffy hop mouthfeel as well as the big fruit hop flavour.

Despite that thickness of the hop feel, it does keep some of the lighter, easier drinking lager elements – it especially shows influence from its claimed pils style in a hop oil sheen that comes with it, accompanying a peppery character that nicely accentuates the bitterness of the beer.

A lot of heavily hopped lagers are good, but suffer as they feel like a weak IPA while also losing the advantages of the lager character to do so. This doesn’t entirely avoid that, in that it does kind of feel like a lighter IPA, but it manages to leverage the lager character better to make this refreshing and easy to drink.

So, not 100% a success, but very full of fruit flavour, and matches a good peppery character to the bitterness that benefits both while still keeping an easy drinking lager character. One of the better IPA/Pils style mash ups out there.

Background: Been enjoying the Lervig collabs recently – so decided to go for this one. Not done many lagers recently so it seemed like a good way to get back on that train. It seems that there is also a version of this called “I got pils, now what?” going around. I presume it is the same beer. This one was grabbed at Independent Spirit again. Decided to go with something from a smaller band to listen to while drinking this – Hate In The Box – Under The Ice. Kind of electro – goth – punk mix and nice one to return to.

Conclusion: You remember those “Backyard Brew” beers from a while back? Beers from a large brewer trying to pass themselves off as a faux craft kind of thing? Well, if you had handed this to me blind and told me it came from them I would not have been surprised. Not to say that this is terrible, but it is so very meh, which is a bad sign. Incidentally, unlike 99% of the population I am actually quite fond of the word “Meh”. Just some random trivia for you.

Anyway, like a lot of the early beers Brewdog did after moving to their new brewery, this feels over attenuated and too dry – losing what should be a refreshing lager character and instead giving slight cardboard notes and granite. So, a few definite down sides to this beer are immediately obvious.

On the up side this does have a fairly solid bitterness and a mix of light lemon and orange notes. A lot of the early brews at the new site also had massive loss in hop character as they dialled in the recipes, so it is good to see that this did not get hit with that problem on rebrew.

However, even the original version of this – going by vague memory – was only ok but not world shattering. This, more attenuated version, means that the positive notes are far from enough to make it a beer I can recommend. Not terrible, but when a faux craft brewer is turning out a better larger than yours, you have a problem.

So – not similar enough to the original brew to be worth it for nostalgia. Not good enough by itself to be worth grabbing. Just meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. So, cannot advise buying.

Between this and the terrible rebrew of 6% abv Punk IPA it really feels like not much effort was put into these rebrews. A great dissapointment.

Background: Was wondering what style to put this under lager wise, so I gave up and checked ratebeer – turns out they now have decided India Style Lager deserves its own category now. Since they managed to resist calling it an India Pale Lager like every other IPA variant name, I have no objection to this. Anyway, this is a rebrew of one of Brewdog’s original three beers which I grabbed from their online store. As always I am not an unbiased actor on Brewdog beers. I had tried Hop Rocker back in the day, but not much and never got around to drinking it. Mostly grabbed Punk IPA back then. Speaking of Punk IPA, they also did a rebrew of the original 6% abv Punk IPA. It was terrible, far too over attenuated – looked like they hadn’t tweaked brew times and recipe to make it work with their new kit. So, I was a tad nervous if this was going to be shit as well. Drunk while listening to a bit of “Hate In The Box” – nice kind of electric punk goth mash up in feel.